Saturday, May 21, 2016 to Saturday, September 3, 2016

This exhibition, developed in partnership with Wrexham Museum tells the story of 4000 years of writing in Ancient Egypt featuring a fantastic range of hieroglyph and cursive writing on a wide range of materials. It is an interactive and family friendly exhibition designed help decode Ancient Egypt.

Writing is one of the most important inventions ever made by humans. By putting spoken language into visible, material form, people could store information and transmit it across time and space. It meant that a person’s word could be recorded and read by others, decades, or even centuries later. It was the first information technology and it was revolutionary.

It would be unthinkable even to try to sketch the history of writing without taking into consideration the wealth of written sources from ancient Egypt. No other culture has yielded such a rich variety of inscribed objects. Nowhere else have they been so well preserved. Ancient Egypt has provided us with literature, letters, songs, biographies and stories written in hieroglyphic and cursive scripts representing four millennia of language evolution. Egypt was a literate culture long before the idea of writing reached Europe. Moreover, a vast amount of written evidence from Ancient Egypt has survived in the dry conditions of North Africa, to be excavated by archaeologists and studied by Egyptologists in museums and universities. Deciphering these scripts has allowed academics to start solving the mysteries of this ancient civilization. Come and explore - you can even try your hand at writing hieroglyphs.

What's On

Museum Masterplan

In 2009 architects and designers Metaphor produced a masterplan for the museum. After the completion of the first stage of this plan – the Wessex Gallery – the masterplan was revised and we now aim to redevelop the remainder of the building with a major HLF grant.